Single And Working: Tally The Costs

THE REST OF US

March 20, 1997|By Jacquelyn Mitchard

I was expelled from the car pool the other day.

It wasn't unexpected: I'd been on waivers since the time I was 20 minutes late after school. But it still sent a splinter into the little space under my heart - the place I keep proof that ours is just the same as every other family in our neighborhood.

There are a lot of splinters in that place, mostly

healed: a school counselor calling me an ambitious career woman not counting the costs to her family, a co-worker telling me, at a shower, ''At this point, I'm just glad to have a happy husband and healthy children. Other women have bigger concerns. But that's mine.'' (Her happy husband left her for a stripper, actually - but that's wicked and small, and it's just what I do when one of those little arrows gets lodged in my vulnerable area.)

''It's not your fault,'' said my seventh-grader, after I told him that our car pool now consisted of him, me and our car. ''I could help you.''

''It is my fault,'' I told him. ''I'm the mother.''

Now, I'm not nailing up a cross for myself here. But my failure to line up the ducks despite two assistants, a sitter, eight phones, five calendars and a date book is neither intelligible or new: I hear the exasperation in the voice at the dentist's office, the piano teacher, the troop meeting . . . Right, sure! We didn't forget. Or if we did, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

Knowing the nature of the day ahead - visitors from out of town, three kids home and many opportunities for error - other mothers would have organized more the night before, instead of selfishly letting even the 1-year-old sit up and watch Party of Five, just to have someone to talk it over with.

Other mothers might have begged a friend to stand in or switched car pool days, admitting they could not perform as ably solo.

Morning, then, would not have come up like thunder. Lost lunches, lost gloves, lost tempers. Change the baby now, or just throw her in her snowsuit? Ferret's loose! The guy from the overnight package service wants you.

I can do this. Car pool is just one week each month. But not anymore.

I don't blame the other parents. My chronic lateness was annoying, even scary. The four other families are made up of two parents and two children. Two-on-two works better than zone defense, one mom told me.

I'm no poster child for the afflictions of single motherhood. I get to work at home, in my own business. I have help. Given that, it's hard to see how I still could be the deli-sliced ham of mothers, sliced way too thin.

Before I was widowed, I couldn't see it as well. When divorced moms Leah or Ellen or Lynn showed up late, trailing soccer clothes fresh from the dirty-laundry hamper, I would think, make priorities.

There are only so many things one person can do.

But what a working single mother has to do is to work and be single. A few weeks ago stories about Mia Farrow's new autobiography told of her legendary tribe of 14, seven still at home. Anyone could do it with live-in nannies, people said. But in my experience, when the buck stops - trouble at school, medication lost - it stops with a child's parent, because the parent, whatever else she does, is the one who needs to know what's going on.

When single mothers who work take out all the costs and count them, usually about 1 a.m., we find that money or help can only prop up a structure that has significant design flaws.

A neighbor whose work project was canceled last week said she spent the day baking cookies with her 4-year-old. Stolen time, she called it. I steal it at bedtime, tacking more onto the day than I should because it's the only day I have.

Now, I could have asked the other car poolers, nice people . . . please, just help me out for a few months. Let my kid ride along when you go. I'll make it up to you. I know it looks as though I'm deliberately too busy and unorganized to take care of my own - but I'm not doing any of this on purpose.